Sherman's March

My wife was out of town this weekend, so I was home alone to tend to our two rambunctious kids and entertain myself in the evenings. I took the opportunity to watch a movie that she might not have cared to watch with me: Sherman's March. It's the consummate "we're not from here" movie, and I relate to its themes particularly well since I come from a family with a Southern heritage, just as the filmmaker/documentarian Ross McElwee does.

McElwee set out to film a documentary about the present-day (well, early 1980s) status of the parts of the South that were brutally conquered by William Tecumseh Sherman at the end of the Civil War, and what he ended up creating was a movie about his tortured love life. The whole thing was filmed in 1981, which was clearly not the beginning of what we now think of as "the 80s" but rather the end of the funky/bizarre/politically-charged 70s. At the very end of his film McElwee returns to his adopted home of Boston and begins to piece his life together again with the slightest tease in the last moments of the movie of a new love affair. This ending completes the theme that for McElwee the North represents possibilities and new beginnings whereas the South is nothing but old habits and memories.

The old saying "you can never go home again" is ever present in this movie. McElwee makes so clear the themes that I consider central to this blog. Those of us who live in places away from family, old friends, and historical connections are constantly forced to reinvent ourselves, and we always feel (maybe just the slightest bit) disconnected from our current surroundings and simultaneously cut off from our old stomping grounds.